Geeky details

[mdlbear]

So the plan for today was to extract the 120GB drive from Harmony, my current desktop, and replace it with the 20GB drive that I was using for backups before I moved over to a 160. Made sense; the SCSI drives in Nova, the main server, are getting a little old, and I'm doing a major upgrade on it. Most of the space on the 120 wasn't being used where it was.

The operation, in the end, was completely trivial.

1. Put the 20GB drive in the removable tray on Harmony
2. reformat it, making three 6GB partitions, a swap, and a little boot partition.
3. Copy the root partition using tar
4. Copy the top level of /v, the big partition on the 120. Almost all of what's left has already been moved somewhere else; worry about it later.
5. adjust /etc/fstab for the changed partition set. This brings us down to this evening.
6. power down, pull the 120, put in the 20.
7. boot from a rescue disk (lnx-bbc 2.1) and re-install grub (the bootloader)
8. reboot

Total about 1 hour's work. Helps that I've played this game before. Linux makes it easy.